The five senses dwell,

blended together, in the body.

The confusion of the senses,
their complementary nature,
their overlap,
agreement, reverberation and discord,
their alliances and interaction
form, according to Michel Serres,
the perception, our diffuse souL
Moved by the physical perceptions of the senses
of by the quite logical perceptions of signals
and messages, we dwell in a host of hard
of soft, individual or social casings;
such is our skin, such are our houses, our cities.
We are the ones who erect them
'Casing, conducive to realization, serves life.
I am it. I reside in it',
Serres writes in The Five Senses,
as an introduction to this visit to a house
which is, perhaps,
merely an 'orthopaedic sensorium',
an additional sense, a common one.
Gerrit Confurius

Krzysztof Pruszkowski (*1943):

KMK 'The Construction which Materializes the
Concept', Photo-Syntheses 1991.
The truth about the pictures of houses
Visit to a House

Michel Serres

Behind the yard, shut off by a fence and gate, secluded, lying in front
of the garden enclosed by a high wall, the house comes together within its
walls. Distant, sheltered, aloof from the world. Inside of it, hard stone or
rough concrete covers itself with coatings, skins, with progressively more
delicate membranes: fine grain plasterwork, smooth plaster of Paris,
wallpaper or paint, with tapestries decorated with patterns, ornaments,
flowers; the house puts layer upon layer, it begins with coarse ones and
ends with pictures. Vertically, there is the same kind of complexity: hollow
spaces for plumbing, gauged brick, steel girders, floor boards, carpeting,
rugs. It all culminates in ornaments and tendrils. And the house closes the
openings as well: window shutters, window frames, double glasswork or
coloured panes, thin wispy curtains, heavy drapes, decorative shabraques,
and at one time, deep jambs: it is a casing which is made to be closed and
surrounds itself with obstacles when it opens up. We must have thougt we
no longer needed to fear this world, that it be only intersected by signals,
when recently we so abruptly opened up our homes. A house functions like
a transformer, where forces come to rest, like a high-energy filter or
converter. Outside, a bitter cold spring or frosty dawn prevails; inside, calm
pictures dream incessantly and do not prohibit conversation. It is inside
that the space of language takes on form. A brain-box, one could say, a
skull. Casings transform the world into colourful patterns, into pictures
which hang on walls, they transform the countryside into tapestries, the
city into abstract compositions. It es their task to replace the sun by a heater
and the world by icons, the rustle of the wind by a few kind words. And the
cellar turns alcohol into odours.
In a house which has been built in this manner, the philosopher writes,
thinks and perceives. Inside. I see, he says, an apple tree through the
window. He seeks the origin of knowledge and puts hims~lf at the
beginning; in this genesis, he inevitably discovers a garden, and in· this
garden only the apple tree interests him, fascinates him: he sees its
blossoms. A long treatise on the tree follows, the drawing which he may
make of it, the picture which he has of it, or the words which he writes,
which he finds in his language about that which is absent in every orchard.
He forgets the window, forgets the jamb, the curtain, the opaque or
transparent panes and, depending on whether he lives in the north or the
south, the sliding mechanism or espagnolette catch. He forgets the house
and its opening in front of the apple tree. The tree, unprotected in the
pouring rain, houses screeching birds at night in its boughs, where they
nest; to prune the tree outside is one thing, to describe it inside, another.
The house, beyond all water, wind, cold, fog, light and darkness, and once
also beyond all noise, shelters - just as the belly of a ship separates us from
the coldness of the ocean. It is a second skin which enlarges our sensorium.
It is a casing, then sight, an eye. A sense of hearing and an auricle. The house
gazes at the apple tree through the window. The skull-house calmly
observes the apple tree through the porthole. One could call the window, a
medioscope, mesoscope or isoscope. It was in this manner that Captain
Nemo made his way slowly, behind the cargo hatch of the Nautilus, to
classifications of fish, to taxonomy, the dictionary of natural history,
instead of to the ocean. The scholar looks at the mounted butterfly in the
glass case or the Linnean chart through his pince-nez, or microbes through
his microscope. Behind the window, the picture of the apple tree
takes on contours, even if the window does nothing to alter its dimensions
The philosopher does not pay attention to the blossoms and fruits - is it an
 acacia or a maple? -, behind the window stands a phantom, in the same way
that we say that behind the pupil or the lense, the delicate reproduction of
an object comes into being on the retina. Through the tympanum of the
window shutters, the storm becomes a plaintive moan, through the
vestibule and the spiral of the staircase, it turns into information.
The house stares through its windows at the vineyards and the thyme
plants. There are orange ornaments, a web of lies, devious oranges on its
walls. The philosopher forgets that the house which has been built up
around him transforms an olive grove into a painting by Max Ernst. The
architect has forgotten this as well. And he feels fortunate when the next
grape harvest outside turns into a maiden with a grape inside. The house
processes that which is given, which can be a threat, and softens it to icons;
it is a casing which produces pictures, a socket or an eye, a camera obscura,
a shed, where specks of sunlight only glitter through a narrow slit, an ear.
Architecture produces painting, as if the fresco or the painting hanging on
the wall were to reveal the final cause of all that is erected. The purpose of
architecture is painting or tapestry. What one took to be ornament becomes
the goal, or at least the result. The wall exists for the painting, the window
for the picture. And the padded door for the secrets of the bedroom.

The philosopher writes about perception, yet he already lives inside of

it, he lives in a kind of perception, embedded in his house like the pupil in
the eye. The writer forgets the window, forgets where he is sitting and his
passive work, and looks at the painting. Or, when he looks at a painting, he
believes it to be a window. He forgets the house, the soft casing, which ends
at the window. He sees the picture, looks absent-mindedly at some icons,
which quickly become abstract having been destroyed by an iconoclastic
wave, and looks at his sheet of paper covered with language, where he
discovers the given.
The house represents a casing for pictures, like a skull or an eye. The
philosopher resides in his problem. The world used to be called the
sensorium of God -let us call the house, the sensorium of man. The heavens
are full of our small efforts.
The room in the house shuts one casing inside the other. When one
slipped into a fold-away bed on Ouessant or into a bed with a canopy in
Rambouillet or Versailles, one was able to count still one more casing, a
somewhat darker one in the illuminated big one. The linens form a bag
inside the boxes which fit inside of each other, rarely does one slip into
them naked - oh, chilly days of childhood when no one slept in his wool
sack. The number of layers, of strata, of walls from plaster to bedsheet, the
number of skins up to real skin amazes empiricists. We have already
counted veils and.protective clothing. No, we do not live as people on earth,
as is written in books, we cannot claim this to be true, we cannot bear it,
rather, we live like a variety of mammals or coddled primates, which, after
having lost their fur, invented the house and immediately filled it with
layers of casings inside of each other. It was the house in the countryside
which faced the world, the completely encapsuled flat of today merely faces
the city. Language forms the last of the protective walls around our tender
skin, following pictures and paintings. When one listens to radio or
television, one believes that the world itself is entering in person.
Aus: Les Cinq Sens, Editions Grasset, Paris 1985. Dbertragung aus dem Franzosischen von
Andrea Spingler, Freiburg. Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Suhrkamp-Verlages, Frank-
furt a.M., der in Kurze eine vollstandige Dbersetzung von Michael Bischof vorlcgt.
Krzysztof Pruszkowski:
KMK 1991